inlooking #010: Airborne toxic events
20230218: different, shorter, better
I love Don DeLillo’s White Noise, his arresting 1985 novel of consumerism, family and campus life, technological encroachment, and the pathological detachment brought on by a culture that seems to thrive on alienation and a voracious appetite for symbol over substance.
I’ve been re-reading White Noise lately because I’ll be teaching a book club on it, starting April 19 and running for six Wednesdays at 6pm. (Details here.) Attentive readers may recall the class on Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse I’ve taught the past couple of years. That class was great fun, and I’ve wanted to find another book to teach. I think White Noise will be it (if there’s enough interest—register here, on a sliding scale). Getting to read a book like this in community with ten or twelve other smart, interested, committed readers is a fantastic experience, and the pace—about 50 pages a week—is relaxed enough to accommodate most schedules.
White Noise is also a great novel to pick apart in this way. The book progresses in short sections, and a lot of DeLillo’s moves ring through pretty clearly along the way. One I’m always especially amused by is his habit of ending sections with a random observation or a detail of the characters’ dissociative relationship with modern life—like this paragraph, which closes a section in which the Gladney family is having lunch together early in the book:
The smoke alarm went off in the hallway upstairs, either to let us know the battery had just died or because the house was on fire. We finished our lunch in silence.
(And no, I haven’t yet seen Noah Baumbach’s film based on the book. But I’ll be checking it out as soon as I finish this latest re-read.)
And what are you reading, attentive reader? Have you read White Noise? What did you think? Have you read anything else lately that interested you? How or why did it do that? Let me know.
UNCERTAINTIES
I last sent this newsletter on August 18, 2022. Five days later, I started writing a novel. Five months and a day after that (i.e., in January), I came to the end of the first draft.
It’s not a terribly long book (and it remains to be seen whether it’s a terribly good one, although I kinda like how it’s shaping up), but I’m just happy I got through the draft. I’m about a third of the way through a second draft now, with about 80 pages revised and about 160 to go. Then I’ll do a third pass and hope it’s anywhere near done (at least, for the moment).
The thing is, I very nearly took a much more circuitous route. There’s this way in which writing is theorem, for me. It involves setting something down and looking it over, poking and prodding it to see whether it’s really true. Where I get in trouble is when I ask someone else to do the testing.
There’s always a point early on in any project, short or long, when I want to go outside myself for validation. I want to give someone a taste of the magazine query I’m working on and have them ask for more. I want someone to read my first three chapters and tell me I’m on the right track.
Very often, this works. I get the validation I’m looking for (though at the cost of some time spent stroking my ego, rather than writing). But I often get something else along with that. I often get a comment or a request. I get an idea. Maybe even a good idea.
This is a terrible thing. Please don’t give me any good ideas.
The thing is, at that point, at the uncertain moment in which I hand over a morsel of my nascent artwork and say, “Please love me,” I’m terribly vulnerable. I’ve made myself so in order to enjoy the relief of the positive response. (I could be thicker-skinned right then, but there’s not a big dopamine rush in receiving something that makes no difference to you, now is there?) I’m in this state of constructed openness, in which I want you to heal the wound I’m showing you, which I happen to have inflicted on myself in order to give myself something to offer you for healing.
Okay, yes, I’m taking this metaphor a bit far maybe, but you get the point (I hope). The point is that I’m creating this uncertainty I’m asking you to solve, and when you solve it by telling me your good idea for some element I might include or some direction I might take the story, I immediately say (because I’ve put myself in this overly receptive place) yes! That’s the greatest idea I’ve ever heard! I’m go glad I showed you this story and that you not only loved me (whew) but gave me this great idea at the same time. And now, because I connect your idea with your love, I’m going to change my direction and go back and incorporate your idea—and then try to move on through a manuscript that’s made miles more difficult because it’s no longer coming from inside myself.
This kind of thing has hung me up plenty of times in the past, and made things much more difficult for me. I become focused on the good idea. Then I go back and show the manuscript to the person who had the good idea, and they say, Sure, but now it’s not working because of X. Or they don’t even remember having the idea in the first place. They’re only trying to help, but it doesn’t matter: I’ve taken the focus off the motivating impulse within myself that gave rise to this thing and is the only thing that will get me through it, and I’ve put it on someone else’s approval. It’s a terrible way to work. Or to live, for that matter.
Happily, I didn’t do any of that, this time. I did show the first three chapters to a couple of people, and they did have a couple of good ideas. But somehow, I think only by the grace of whatever god is out there and not through my own good work or deserving nature, I just let the ideas lie there. I didn’t pick them up and try to shoulder them the rest of the way through. I just moved lightly through the manuscript, always moving forward, as I’ve learned I have to do, and eventually I came to the end.
And if you’re like me, just getting to the end of even a terrible draft is a wonderful thing. It is the very minimum requirement for writing a good book. No matter how polished my first three chapters, they aren’t worth a thing if they don’t have the subsequent eighteen or twenty-three or thirty-seven chapters behind them. So, down with the good ideas, I say, and press on.
There’s a lot more I want to tell you about (floods, essays, Sapphic noir demonic angel gumshoe magic), but in the interest of space and not overburdening your attention span, attentive reader, it’ll have to wait.
Til next time,
Wallace